Protecting a Few Students From Stereotypes Can Benefit Class

A new study has found that interventions targeted at individual students can improve the classroom environment and trigger a second wave of benefits for all classmates.

The study’s findings suggest that sharing a classroom with greater numbers of students who participate in a brief intervention can boost all students’ grades.

“Our results suggest that the whole effect of an intervention is more than the sum of its individual effects,” said psychological scientist Dr. Joseph Powers of Stanford University, lead author on the study.

“As a field, we’ve often focused on understanding and changing individual psychological processes, but these findings show that changing individual psychology can trigger important second-order effects with measurable benefits for everyone in the environment.”

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from two previous intervention studies conducted with seventh graders. Both studies involved a values affirmation exercise aimed at diminishing the threat of negative stereotypes related to the academic abilities of African-American students.

The first study took place in 45 classrooms at the beginning of the school year. Students received a writing prompt from their teachers, who were not aware of the research hypothesis. The prompt instructed some students to write about their most important values, such as friends or artistic ability. These students were in the intervention group.

Other students, assigned to the control group, received a prompt instructing them to write about their least important values.

After about 15 minutes of writing, the students placed their responses in envelopes, which were collected by their teachers.

On average, about half of the students in each classroom participated in the study. Importantly, the students believed that the exercise was a typical writing assignment for class, the researchers noted.

Previous research by members of the research team found that writing about their most important values at the beginning of the year helped insulate students from negative stereotypes about their racial groups, which boosted the grades of African-American students, but not those of white students, as the researchers had predicted.

The new analyses showed that individual student grades also improved just from being in classrooms with a greater proportion of African-Americans who received the intervention, according to the researchers.

The results showed that the intervention effects didn’t just “spill over” to untreated students; rather, the classroom environment improved, and the improved environment benefited everyone in it.

For example, white students who saw no direct effects from the intervention still benefitted from the improved classroom environment, and African-American students who directly benefited from the initial intervention also received a second wave of benefits from the improved classroom environment, the researchers explained.

The boost appeared to be especially strong for low-performing students of all races, the scientists said. The data indicate that adding just two African-American students to the intervention group in a typical classroom improved the classroom environment enough that low-performing students’ grades increased, on average, by a third of a letter grade from a C to a C+.

The second study, conducted with a separate group of seventh graders in 15 different classrooms, confirmed these findings, the researchers reported.

Further analyses revealed that the improvements in the classroom were not influenced by various individual- and classroom-level factors, including student race, student intervention condition, and teacher team, in either study.

The researchers said they were surprised by the strength of these effects, which were as large as or even larger than the direct effects that triggered them.

“It really makes you wonder how often we underestimate the full impact of social interventions,” said Powers.

The researchers plan on exploring these effects further to investigate the mechanisms that drive them and the conditions that may limit them. They posit that the intervention may lead to strong indirect effects by strengthening classroom norms of cooperation, order, and growth in ways that benefit all students in the classroom.

The study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Janice Wood

Janice Wood is a long-time writer and editor who began working at a daily newspaper before graduating from college. She has worked at a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites, covering everything from aviation to finance to healthcare.

APA Reference Wood, J. (2015). Protecting a Few Students From Stereotypes Can Benefit Class. Psych Central.
Retrieved on May 24, 2018, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2015/12/22/protecting-a-few-students-from-stereotypes-benefits-whole-classroom/96577.html

Last updated: 22 Dec 2015Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 22 Dec 2015Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.